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Dementia 'costing UK £23bn a year

Dementia costs the country £23 billion per year and more than cancer and heart disease combined but receives a fraction of the funding, according to a "wake up call" report.

The number of sufferers at 822,000 is also 17% higher than has previously been estimated and will pass the one million mark before 2025, the Alzheimer's Research Trust said.

Revealing stark differences in research funding, it calculated that for every pound spent on dementia studies, £12 is spent on investigating cancer and £3 on heart disease.

According to the report, which was prepared with experts from Oxford University, dementia's overall annual cost dwarfs the £12 billion cost for cancer care and the £8 billion for heart disease.

The £23 billion is made up of £9 billion in social care costs, £12 billion in unpaid care and £1.2 billion in health care costs.

Each dementia patient costs the economy £27,647 each year, researchers found, nearly five times more than a cancer patient and eight times more than someone suffering from heart disease.

The expense is driven mainly by the extent of unpaid carers and long-term institutional care - in contrast to cancer and heart disease whose costs are mainly taken care of by the NHS.

Big differences in research funding were also revealed in the study, called the Dementia 2010 report.

The report calculated that £295 is spent on research for every person with cancer, compared with just £61 for each person with dementia, and it documents a "diagnosis gap" between the expected number of people with dementia and the number of patients with dementia on GP registers.

In England, it is estimated only 31% of people with dementia are registered on GP lists.

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